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Sound card recommendations?



Title: Sound card recommendations?

Dear members of the list,

We are trying to conduct challenging acoustic recordings in a complex spatial setup, but our soundcard doesnt seem to support our requirements.

For the recordings we need to present sound trough six channels and record with three channels concurrently. The required sample rate is 96 kHz with an audio sample size of 32 bits. And basically, each bit is of high importance.

We have had very good results using an ECHO Layla G3 sound card with a PCI card interface on a stationary laboratory PC. In order to give us more flexibility with the setup we want to move the setup to a laptop PC with a ECHO Audiofire8 sound card connected via a Firewire400 interface. Both cards have very similar technical specifications and are supposed to support the mentioned requirements. The laptop has more computational power and larger working memories as the stationary PC. Unfortunately, when conducting recordings with the firewire card we always obtain glitches corrupting the measurements. According to ECHO, the fault might be a not compatible chipset in the PCs firewire interface. We tried the firewire card on various PC/Laptops in house but none is willing to work properly.

In our thoughts, the glitches could appear because we use the card on its limits, but the PCI version doesnt show these issues. My question to the list is now, whether there is anybody who can recommend a reliable firewire sound card, able to record present and record sound on various channels simultaneously with a high sensitivity and reliability? Is there possibly anyone who has experience with ECHO Audiofire12 sound card? This would probably be our next attempt, since we would gain some headroom. The card has up to 12 analogue inputs and 12 analogue outputs and a maximum sample rate of 192 kHz.

Best regards,

Patrick

(((O)))(((O)))(((O)))(((O)))(((O)))

Dipl.-Ing.(FH) Patrick Maas, MSc.

Research Engineer

Oticon A/S

Eriksholm Research Centre

Kongevejen 243

DK-3070 Snekkersten

E-mail: pma@xxxxxxxxx

Phone: +45 48 29 89 00

+45 48 29 89 31 (direct)

Fax:     +45 49 22 36 29

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